How semantic is your XHTML/CSS markup?

Question

I think I'm pretty good at using semantic markup on my pages but I still have a handful of classes like this:

/**** Aligns ****/
.right_align  { text-align: right; }
.left_align   { text-align: left; }
.center_align { text-align: center; }

Which, technically, is a no-no. But when you just want to position some text in a table, how crazy am I supposed to get with the semantic markup?

Answer 1

Why do you want to align the text?

The answer to the question is the name of the id or class you need to have for your selector. Do you want to align it right because it's a price?

table .price {
  text-align: right
}

Just ask yourself why do you want to apply a particular style, and all will become clear.

I probably overdid it, but my last work project was pretty close 100% semantic- anything I needed which was not semantic (say, a filler div which I could not do without for a layout requirement), I added dynamically using jQuery.

Answer 2

If you want tight coupling between the table cells and the alignment, you could just assign the attribute style="text-align:right" directly on the tag. There is no reason to go the extra level of indirection through a class if you dont use it for a level of abstraction anyway.